By John Helmer, Moscow For the second time in as many months President Vladimir Putin has publicly endorsed India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to win the Indian national election now under way. On April 12, in a four-and-a-half-line posting,  the Kremlin announced that Modi had been awarded the Order of St. Andrew the Apostle the […]

by Editor - Monday, April 15th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow The case for and against Julian Assange (lead image, 3rd from left) will keep him in the UK for at least eighteen months, probably two years, possibly three, according to leading London lawyers.  The UK will have a new government by then; the US too. In the interval, Assange’s lawyers are […]

by Editor - Sunday, April 14th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow This week, desperate for attention in New York’s overstocked literary market, a biographer of Vladimir Nabokov’s wife and of the witches of Salem, has reported the one-hundred year anniversary of the departure of the Nabokov family from Crimea in April 1919. “Amid frantic, last-minute negotiations, under a spray of machine-gun fire, […]

by Editor - Thursday, April 4th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow The indictment of ex-minister Mikhail Abyzov is a clear signal; the arrest of former Khabarovsk Governor and ex-presidential representative Victor Ishayev is another.  The system of high-level administrative protection, on which these two notoriously corrupt figures have relied for the past twenty years, has ceased protecting them. There is a legion […]

by Editor - Wednesday, April 3rd, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow In crowded city life, crabs – plural – meant an invasion of lice into warm body parts covered by hair. For readers who are virgins or who have had Brazilian waxing and can’t imagine running into the crabs, the illustration shows the little fellows in the hair of the head. In […]

by Editor - Monday, April 1st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow A Financial Times reporter has just published the claim that a London arbitration tribunal decided last Sunday in favour of Michael Calvey’s claims against Artem Avetisyan and Sherzod   Yusupov. Calvey, Avetisyan and Yusupov are Moscow-based shareholders in the merger of  Vostochny Bank and Uniastrum Bank. Counting their combined assets, the re-named […]

by Editor - Wednesday, March 27th, 2019
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By John Helmer. Moscow According to the rule of Soviet law, which Russians over the age of 40 believe, most forms of capitalism are a crime, especially investment banking. By the rule of modern Russian politics, if Alexei Kudrin, German Gref, and Andrei Kostin announce a man is innocent, he is bound to be guilty […]

by Editor - Sunday, March 24th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow Twenty years ago, on April 25, 1999, the annual memorial service for ANZAC Day at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church of Moscow allowed the Turkish Ambassador to speak from the pulpit, in front of the altar. I walked out, and then protested to the Australian and New Zealand ambassadors – Ruth Pearce […]

by Editor - Thursday, March 21st, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow Alexei Kudrin (lead image) is the longest-running candidate for regime change in the Kremlin who is not in jail, or outside the country. “We need a friendly global environment,” he told  a business conference in Moscow last week. Currently chairman of the Accounting Chamber, the state auditor, Kudrin explained this is […]

by Editor - Monday, March 18th, 2019
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By John Helmer, Moscow Oleg Deripaska has filed a lawsuit in federal US court in Washington, DC, requesting US help to save him “from… the devastating power of U.S. economic sanctions… in a manner that is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution.” Deripaska has also accused the US Government of aiding and abetting the Russian Communist […]

by Editor - Sunday, March 17th, 2019
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